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TriCaster 410, 460, 860, 8000

About a year and a half ago we announced the TriCaster 8000, in making that product I remember walking into a meeting with all of the engineers and saying that what we needed to build should be "game over" (the exact words I used) in terms of the level of switching capabilities that we had. We added 4 DSKs, 8 M/Es with full re-entrancy, full camera moves in virtual sets, macros, and much much more. I am probably pretty comfortable in saying that in terms of raw capabilities the jump in technology that we made for the 8000 was the largest that we have ever made and maybe one of the largest the industry has ever seen. (Use an 850 Extreme, then move over to an 8000 to see what I mean !)

Now the challenge when you do that, is that you have to 1-up yourself the next time around and try to achieve an even bigger step ... and that gets more and more difficult. This said, in my opinion and as someone who has spent the last year or so of my life working on this, the new product line absolutely achieves that, and indeed represents by far the largest jump in capabilities that we have ever had. What you have seen listed on the forums, in the press releases and in the stream really only are the "big ticket items", indeed there are so many large feature changes that we had to leave off the press release entirely to keep the length reasonable (e.g. no mention of the major audio changes, the monitoring improvements, etc... etc...) and to give an idea of the scope of the improvements and tweaking that has gone on ... the internal engineering document of new capabilities is just over 20 pages long.

There is just no way that I could list everything here, but I did want to offer a couple of "non headline" comments that I believe are in many ways as big as some of higher profile features to people who use TriCaster systems every day. I should also emphasize that almost all of these improvements came through conversations and suggestions from end users, many of whom are on these forums.

In DDRs you can now view one play list while you are playing another one.

Internally all ddrs now use the 3play playback engine, so moving through clips is way (20x) faster, slow motion is field interpolated, all delays selecting new clips are gone, perfect defielded clip pausing, etc...

You can use sessions as templates for new sessions. This allows you to set up a session that has everything you want as your base show, then use it as the template every time you start a new show.

Avid Artist MIX is supported in all models

The record and capture tabs allow the recorded clips to go straight into any play list. This seems like a trivial change, but is huge in practice. You can be have replays automatically drop into a play-list that is not on output, etc... etc...

Audio recording is now done at 24bits across the board.

As others have mentioned, any CS works on any product, withing reasonable limits of course (using a 40CS to drive an 8000 is possible but not entirely recommended!)

The additional third party support is huge. I have not seen mention of this yet, but TeraDek wireless cameras boxes will work onto network inputs at full native resolution (I am very excited about this, TeraDek make amazing products.) USB cameras do as well (do not get carried away.)

Sharing session folders on the network is a single click and the sw does it all automatically.

Any network input can play any source over the web, including http sources, rtmp, rtsp, etc... etc...

The TriCasters all support network out via http served MPEG streams. This one is going to resonate for years to come! Any source that can read and decode MPEG I-Frame only over http can see our output. This canb be used for customer ffmpeg encoding, archiving, streaming, feeding our input into VLC media player for additional viewing, etc... etc...

FX row has been replaced with color groups. In effect this gives you 4 FX rows, and is just wildly more powerful than what we did before, and easier to use.

The audio mixer improvements really deserve their own entire article, but solo is now WAY better and supports multiple sources, audio follows video is finally what it should have always been; it is way more powerful and way easier to use.

Thumbnails everywhere have checkboard to show clips and titles with alpha.

Audio inputs can be renamed now (just like video inputs can).

The audio routing and outputs are really cool and enable lots of the complex routing configurations that I cannot remember how many times I have been asked for !

There is a configurable per audio input delay. This is a small feature but one every digital A/V mixer _really_ needs these days. The problem is that on almost all modern affordable cameras the digital audio path has a delay to it. This means that if you are using these cameras with analog audio (as almost everyone does!) then the video is going to pear out of sync with the video that got delayed. We allow this to be corrected per audio input.

Macros have a full editor across the board.

I've seen a lot of mention of macros, MIDI, hot-spots, etc... each of these features are cool ... but the real magic is that once you bring them all together you get something that is way way more than the sum of it's parts. I predict that this is going to change every workflow for every user. Ultimately the TriCaster just completely controllable by almost anything you can imagine.

Following on with MIDI, you can now use MIDI sequencers, lighting controllers, etc... to control and script a TriCaster system. Even Garage Band can now store midi events to change video channels. Using something like TouchOSC you can easily have second operators controlling PTZ cameras, uploading to social media, etc... I am waiting for the first person to hook up a MIDI laser harp to a TriCaster !

Single shot animation buffers rock. Basically they are a buffer that plays automatically when you take it to air, every time. This allows you to have your station logos, ads, etc... in a buffer then just click take on the DSK to put it on and it will play automatically. You no longer need to think about automatically setting up and manually playing animated logos, etc...

The main switcher has preset slots just like everywhere else on the UI.

We have this really cool new propriety "super resolution" algorithm that can double image sizes without blurring edges, this is integrated across the board in defies ding which makes for better streaming quality, better still grabbing, better DDR clip freezing, social media uploads, etc...

All tally indication is now recursive with support for M/Es, and will always show "red" when a source is on program out, even if that occurs through very complicated setups.

PTZ is very cool, and allows you to save a whole bunch of production costs (fewer camera operators) ... but it really comes into it's own when you tie it to macros and all of the ways those can be triggered.

You have display overlays on any multiview for "4:3 safe", "Centre cross", etc...

Our UI team have done an amazing job on the design of the product (and there is a cool new easter-egg !)

The SDK has got vastly better and covers way more than ever before. You can, for instance, write external apps that can update our titles (which can be in Medial Players or any of the 15 new buffers!) remotely ... and I know that there are some cool applications of that coming that are really amazing (YoungMonkey is doing his magic ... but I cannot say more at this time).

On the subject of the SDK, there is now a macro "plugin" that allows third parties to implement their own commands that get run as our macros. The possibilities for this are absolutely endless because it allows you to take almost anything you would ever want to control and build it into your TriCaster workflow, assign it to hot-spots, CS keys, etc... I wrote above that "Ultimately the TriCaster just completely controllable by almost anything you can imagine.", but this capability also opens it up to also control anything external that you can imagine.

The video quality across the board is dramatically improved. We tend not to show quality comparisons, but I personally look into this a lot. Our scaling is pretty much perfect signal processing wise, everything is done in native YCbCrA without conversion - this is really really important and one of the dirty secret of a lot of devices out there is that they go via RGB that causes all sorts of artifacts. Anything that needs to come in RGB for us has 2D error diffusion color conversion applied to it (the difference of this is very noticeable) and the list goes on and on ...

The free 8000 update introduces an entirely new "next generation" internal rendering engine that does full integration sample anti-aliasing and edge smoothing, etc...

All cs units have a fail safe so we can detect dropped USB connections. We can then actively try to recover them even if the motherboard chipset has become locked up (very common with poor USB extenders).

All Tricasters only need to be registered once, after that hey remember their registration no matter what. Even if you restore you system, crush and pulverize the system drive !

And that is just some of the "small stuff" that I remembered after spending the day on a flight !

I am also itching to tell you about some of the third party integration that are coming as well, but I would prefer to not preempt those. Just rest assured that it is even just limited to NewTek developing what we do at amazing pace, but there is some ground breaking new stuff coming from other companies that works directly with us.

Andrew

ps. For anyone who uses any system from the XD300 onward, we continue to actively move any bug fixes we find as part of our development back into those products when it is remotely possible. Indeed, we are going to put out an update for all of those very soon.

Andrew, Kudos to your entire team. You hit it out of the park with this one!

Thank you so much. At the end of the day this is our baby and we do it because we really do love it.

Unlike probably almost anywhere else, we do not base our product designs on "market research" or trying to "fill in check lists"; and that is one of the things that is so cool about working at NewTek for me. It really is feedback from our customers (much of it from these forums, indeed I bet that anyone who has asked for something here can see some part of that in the product today) and our resellers that are what guide us and form the basis of what we do. We always do try to take that and then try to do something that is amazing with it (we hope) which is how ideas like Holographic Livesets are born.

With all the added features I would think it would be a daunting task to use only but a few on a one-man show without the use of programmable macros. Multiple input controls allows several people to control the different features during an event. This can also create another profit center of having smaller individual courses and certs for Tricaster Audio, Tricaster Social Media, etc . . .with the combination leading up to the Tricaster Master. I can see that final test being a live event simulation similar to the Kobayashi Maru Test. Who will become the only person to beat the simulation?

A big thanks to you Andrew and the rest of crew. You do listen to your users without a doubt. It brings a smile to my face everytime I use TriCaster and I use one of my feature requests. I can't wait to try some of the other features that I may have looked over. Even better, I can't wait to call my clients and say, "remember that thing you wished TriCaster had? it is in there now".

Well I think you covered everything on my wish list. No really. The new audio functionality especially makes me really, really happy.

Oh, wait I thought of something PTZ/Liveset integration so the cameras can actually move when using a Liveset. There, now you've something to work on. I'll get started on the pan/tilt/zoom/dolly/track/pedestal hardware.

It looks amazing - the macros and midi is the most incredible add on and will make this move up another level. My only gripe is the price of the upgrade from 450 and 850 based machines is just not worthwhile so we are having to buy it again really.

Thankfully I have a 455 so this is just a decent software upgrade for one of our machines.

Well I think you covered everything on my wish list. No really. The new audio functionality especially makes me really, really happy.

Oh, wait I thought of something PTZ/Liveset integration so the cameras can actually move when using a Liveset. There, now you've something to work on. I'll get started on the pan/tilt/zoom/dolly/track/pedestal hardware.

It looks amazing - the macros and midi is the most incredible add on and will make this move up another level. My only gripe is the price of the upgrade from 450 and 850 based machines is just not worthwhile so we are having to buy it again really.

I agree, and this was a very hard decision for us. Ultimately we always want to take care of our existing customers and always do it even if it ends up making us hardly anything at all. Ultimately loyalty needs to run both ways between customers and NewTek. In this case the problem is just that the hardware in 450s and 850s goes back far enough that it is just not possible to full ensure that it will work reliably under all workloads and we just did not want to compromise the capabilities of the product itself to go back that far.

If I can, I'll be presumptuous enough to respond on behalf of the many individuals who shared in the design and development, and tell you that it makes us really happy to see the nice response typified in this thread. An astonishing amount of work has gone into all of this, and we're extremely pleased not just by the result but to know that its fills the real world needs of our loyal customers.

Originally Posted by jcupp

The new audio functionality especially makes me really, really happy.

As one of the principle 'impossible to satisfy', 'more, better!' audio whingers around here, that makes me especially happy.

I also would like to say thanks to you Andrew and the rest of crew! You are the best! And also say thanks to Steve that is making a great job helping us in this Forum. Steve I believe you will be busy in the next days!!!
Do you know if to upgrade 455 to 460 will be necessary to change the internal hard disk, or just a software update? Maybe a new SSD?